It’s almost adorable how much NetherRealm cares about Mortal Kombat’s lore. This is a video game that built a dynasty out of jellified gore, cartoonishly proportioned femme fatales, and payloads of callow, South Park-ian bathroom humour. One of the core protagonists – a Van Damme knockoff named Johnny Cage – possesses a signature move where he drops into splits and delivers a debilitating nut-punch. (The unlucky victim quivers in weak-kneed agony for half a beat, opening them up to a devastating combo.) Another character, the rotund drunken master Bo’ Rai Cho, has an offensive moveset that is completely structured around his ability to projectile vomit with startling accuracy, causing his enemies to slip and fall in the muck.
And yet, despite the vaudevillian foundation of the canon, NetherRealm is perhaps the last studio on the planet still committed to delivering a blockbuster single-player campaign in their fighting games. That makes Mortal Kombat 1, somehow the 12th game in the series, a bit of a dinosaur compared to its contemporaries. But if you know and love this cast of lunatics, you’ll undoubtedly enjoy a fresh trip down memory lane.
Mortal Kombat 1, as the name implies, is a hard reboot of the franchise’s chronology. All of the principal figures of the canon – the lightning god Raiden, the princess turned ninja Kitana, and yes, even the action-flick flunkie Johnny Cage – have been reinserted into their youthful selves, on a brand new timeline, with no knowledge of the multiverse-spanning hijinks of the previous three games. But peace can last for only so long on Earthrealm, and soon enough, all of them are recruited to participate in the “Mortal Kombat tournament”, which was the original narrative scaffolding that undergirded the series back when it was bound to arcade cabinets. The story unfurls with tremendous pomp and circumstance – essentially a full-length animated film, with stellar performances and erudite Hollywood framing – which occasionally phases seamlessly into a standard, best-of-three clash against an AI opponent. Mortal Kombat 1 is made to be nostalgic; lousy with allusion, callbacks, and portentous references to be paid off later – fetish material for anyone who’s ever binged the annals of Mortal Kombat lore. We’ll learn, for instance, how exactly Kenshi lost his eyesight, or the nature of Mileena’s carnivorous disease. Wistfulness for the recent past is perhaps the single most profitable extraction in the pop-culture strata, and NetherRealm knows how to play the hits.
Meanwhile, Mortal Kombat’s combat fundamentals have remained largely unchanged since the series returned to its 2D roots, more than a decade ago. This is still a fighting game built around long, intricate combos; levitating your opponent into the air with a cocktail of punches and kicks, obliterating half a health bar after one errant, punishable move. This has always made Mortal Kombat a difficult game to master, and the action has become even more complex with the addition of “Kameo Fighters” – a partner in crime, selected at the Character Select screen, who can be tagged in for a quick assist. (For instance, if Sub-Zero is set as your Kameo, he can pop in to freeze your opponent, opening up all sorts of wild strategies.)
The animation is scintillating when the game is played by its maestros – pure poetic carnage as the duelists trade disembowelling 12-input attacks with frame-perfect precision. To get to that level, though, one must grind through hours of quick-match defeats and training-room fine-tuning, forever driving a partition between the diehards and the casuals. Street Fighter 6 softened its exterior by introducing a new control scheme that streamlined much of the gameplay, but Mortal Kombat 1 hasn’t instituted a similar set of reforms. If NetherRealm has left you twisting in the wind in the past, don’t expect a helping hand here.
Mortal Kombat 1 is also home to an esoteric, slightly underbaked “Invasions” mode, which injects a dash of RPG-ish grinding – complete with random encounters and variating elemental damage types – to its bread-and-butter brawling mechanics. I found this to be less compelling than either the campaign or the standard multiplayer ladder, but it’s good to see that NetherRealm is, at the very least, considering how they might reinvent the wheel in the future. After all, this is supposed to be a total reimagining of Mortal Kombat oeuvre; a new beginning for all of our twisted, bloodsoaked combatants. I’m happy to have them back in my life, but it’s a shame they didn’t learn a few more tricks during their time away.
• Mortal Kombat 1 is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
